The present invention relates to storage devices and more particularly to a disk array unit for storing data in a single or a plurality of disk units and a storage system comprised of a plurality of disk array units.
In recent years, the storage controller used in enterprises or the like has been increasing in scale year by year. For one thing, so-called consolidation in which a plurality of storage controllers are consolidated and used is responsible for scale increasing. More specifically, a system has hitherto been configured to meet different purposes by using a plurality of distributed storage controllers. The consolidation, however, has succeeded in collectively storing pieces of data for many different purposes in a single storage controller of large capacity.
By making a single storage controller of large capacity utilizable cooperatively to be shared among different systems in this manner, the installation area can be decreased and the cost of management of a plurality of storage controllers can be reduced. What matters is, however, security. Especially when pieces of data utilized in systems directed to different purposes or having different levels of requirements for security are stored in one storage controller, it of course matters that individual data pieces will be accessed erroneously or erased by mistake. As measures to solve these problems, performing access control based on authentication of access requesters or limiting access by using logical partitioning have been considered.
For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,484,173, a contrivance is disclosed according to which in a disk controller, access requesters are authenticated by means of ID's or passwords and only an operation authorized pursuant to an access control list is allowed.
Further, U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,209B1 or JP-A-2001-265655 describes a system in which access from a host computer or a discoverable LUN (Logical Unit Number) is limited by means of an ID of an access originator (for example, WWN (worldwide name) or S (source)_ID in Fiber Channel protocol).
Furthermore, US 2002/0103969A1 or JP-A-2002-182859 discloses a method for achieving system consolidation by carrying out volume logical division mainly according to the utilization rate or unoccupied capacity of a physical drive.